Observer; The C-Span Miracle

By RUSSELL BAKER

Published: October 29, 1994

The real miracle of television is C-Span. I lie abed at a roadside inn in Grantville, Pa., and C-Span takes me back to youth. Or whatever that fizzy condition was back there in the mists of faraway 1962.

It is the spectacle of Senator Edward M. Kennedy debating one Mitt Romney in Boston that does the trick, but there would be no spectacle here by the Pennsylvania high road if it were not for C-Span.

Mightier television powers, treating this spectacle as a parochial Massachusetts exercise, decline to interrupt their nightly flow of electronic slush by showing it.

Only C-Span spreads it out across the darkening continent. C-Span brings it to remote burgs where America's indispensable truckers and highly dispensable motorists hunker down exhausted by long days of violating the 55-mile-per-hour speed limit.

Lying abed, nerves still twanging after eight hours of high-speed driving, we heavy-footed gallants of the gas pedal can nevertheless become informed citizens qualified to think and talk politics and even to vote, thanks to C-Span.

This Kennedy-Romney debate, however, is about more than politics. It is also about the tricks time plays on everybody who stays around long enough.

I have seen something like this Kennedy-Romney campaign before. It was in 1962, in fact, when an editor sent me to Boston to cover the Senate campaign of an utterly unqualified but well-connected young man, name of Edward Moore Kennedy.

What a fine figure he cut, a little beefy to be sure, but moving with powerful athletic grace, and young, terribly young, barely old enough in fact to be eligible for the Senate.

Utterly inexperienced in government of course, and really, really terribly arrogant he was, trying to start at the top by becoming a senator like that. The arrogance was unspeakable. Still he was well connected. So well connected. The President's kid brother.

There was a highly qualified veteran against him for the party nomination: Eddie McCormack, who'd paid his dues, learned government on Massachusetts turf from the ground up. He was obviously doomed and, having nothing to lose, spoke the brutish fact aloud.

If his opponent's name were just Edward Moore, his candidacy would be a joke, said Eddie McCormack.

Now here in this motel 32 years later C-Span is taking me back to then. Now Romney is the arrogant upstart who wants to begin his political career at the top. Now Kennedy is the old professional.

If Romney were not heavy with millions to squander on a political campaign, his candidacy would be a joke. Kennedy doesn't say it outright, but it is the message behind every jab he takes at his young opponent, who cuts such a fine figure and is not so badly connected either.

His father, once a Republican Governor of Michigan, was a player at the Presidential level himself, though he was ground up by Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller et al.

Young, rich Romney's main arguments are that he has been successful in private business and has no experience in government. These of course are thought to constitute a winning hand in what is said to be a Republican year.

Kennedy now makes the Eddie McCormack argument. He has paid his dues, knows how to make the system work, can compete with know-how and power against the Senate's Republican mossbacks who want to see Massachusetts punished for its long fling with Democratic liberals.

In the debate it is Romney now who sounds youthfully tart and scrappy, if not always at ease with the senatorial back-room mysteries. Kennedy, by contrast, has been a Senator so long that he no longer seems to feel obliged to finish speaking his thoughts. He starts sentences that head north then switch course in the third or fourth relative clause and amble off to east, west, south -- wherever the four winds blow.

After so long in the Senate, he expects everybody to know what he means and finish his thoughts for him. Lying abed, marveling at the wonder of C-Span, I am not thinking along with him. I am too busy thinking of when we both were young, green and arrogant. I am thinking, "How we both have changed!" I am thinking time really grinds a man down.